Sitting in the White House Situation Room, Reagan heard the briefers from the Joint Staff calmly tell him that, in a Soviet attack, about 5,700 nuclear weapons would explode on American soil, destroying three quarters of the U.S. strategic nuclear forces and killing 80 million Americans. The briefers spelled out the Major Attack Options and Selective Attack Options from PD-59, as well as an option for Launch Under Attack: firing the missiles, especially the land-based ICBMs, before they were hit by the incoming Soviet warheads. (Most of SAC’s officers had figured, from the time of the first
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